Wednesday, July 13, 2016

In part 1of The Quest for Personal Myth, I told you
about my own, specific story. In part 2, I will let somebody else who is
infinitely smarter and more competent than myself to talk about this subject
matter, to tell us about OUR story and why this Quest is so important. Here is
an extract from Joseph Campbell’s book Pathways to Bliss to inform and inspire you. Here we go:

“(…)Mythological
images are the images by which the consciousness is put in touch with the
unconscious. That’s what they are(…) When these symbols disappear, we have lost
the vehicle for communication between our waking consciousness and our deeper
spiritual life. We have to reactivate the symbol, to bring it back to life, and
to find what it means, to relate it to ourselves in some way or another.

Now, what
did Jung (Carl Gustav Jung) when he decided to seek out his
Myth? His process of discovery is interesting in that it was so childish. Here
he was, thirty-seven years old or so,and he asked himself, What was it I most enjoyed doing as a little boy
when I was alone and allowed to play? As it turned out, what he liked to do was
to put rocks together and make little cities out of stone.

So, he said,
Why, I am a big man now, so I’ll play with big stones. He bought himself a
piece of property in a beautiful place on the lake opposite the city of Zürich.
He began planning and building a house in this lovely place, Ascona, and as he
worked with his hands, he activated his imagination.

Now, that’s
the big thing, to activate your imagination somehow. You can’t do this by
taking suggestions from somebody else. You must find that which your own
consciousness wants to meditate on. With his imagination activated, Jung found
all kinds of new fantasies coming, dreams of all kinds. He began making records
of what he had dreamed and then amplifying it by all kinds of associations.

By doing
this, he began the work of discovering his myth. He found that his dreams were
becoming very important to him and very rich; he began writing about his dreams
in a little journal. He put down each silly little impulse, each theme that
came up in his dreams. He recorded the dreams as to bring them up into his
consciousness, and as he kept the journal, the underlying images began coming
through. Then he would make pictures of some of these dream things - always in
a very solemn way. Now, this book is the kind of thing one would not wish to
have published; it is just too private (Joseph Campbell refers here to The Red Book that was first published in 2009, 48
years after Jung’s death). It was his ceremonial, ritualistic exploration of
the place from which the mystery of his life came.

If you keep
a dream journal, you’ll find the dreams begin piling up on you. You want to go
to sleep again and have some more. And you’ll find a story is building itself
up there. Of course, you have to have a little free time to do this(…)

Soon after
he began keeping his dream journal, Jung realized that his dreams correspond to
the great mythic themes that he had been studying in working on Symbols of Transformation. Mandalas
began coming - Jung was the first to become interested in mandalas as a
psychological vehicle of self-discovery(...) With the newly activated imagination,
Jung came to the realization that dreams are of two orders: little dreams and
big dreams.

Little
dreams come from a level of dream consciousness that has to do with quite
personal complications. They emerge from the level that has come to be known as
the Freudian or unconscious. Little dreams are essentially autobiographical in
their character, and there will be nothing in these particular dreams of yours
that you would share with others - you are sorting through the expansion of
consciousness as it bumps up against the taboos and “thou shalt nots” of your
childhood and infancy.

Then comes
another kind of dream, where you find yourself facing a problem that’s not
specific to your peculiar life or social or age situation. Rather you have run up
against one of the greatest problems of man. These are what Jung calls big
dreams.

For
instance, take the question that I broached a while ago: what is it that
supports you in the face of total disaster? At such times, the psyche and the
ego consciousness are forced to wrestle with the two huge mysteries of the
nature of the cosmos and death. No other animal recognizes itself as being
pulled between these two great mysteries. Also, deep within yourself lies the
mystery of your own being to be dealt with. Your ego consciousnesswill be confronted with these overwhelming
mysteries – the cosmos, death, and your own depth. When you face these sort of
questions – instead of whether you should or should not go to bed with somebody
– you are in a field of profound problems. As it happens, the great mythologies
of the world also deal with these problems.

Now, as I’ve
said, these themes are universal. Of course, they occur with different
historical inflections here, there, and elsewhere; just so, they’ll occur with
different inflections in your life from those in anyone else’s. For every
mythological symbol, there are two aspects to be distinguished: the universal
and the local. Adolf Bastian coined the terms Elementargedanken (Elementary Ideas) and Völkergedanken (Ethnic ideas or Folk Ideas) to describe these two
aspects.

I find that
in India the same two aspects are recognized. There they are called mãrga and deśī, respectively. Mãrga comes
from the root that has to do with an animal trail; it means “the path”. By
this, Indians mean the path by which the particular aspect of a symbol leads
you to personal illumination; it is the path of enlightenment. Deśī means “of the province”. All
mythological symbols, therefore, work in two directions: in the direction of mãrga and in the direction of deśī. The deśī, or local, links the individual to the culture.

A
mythologically grounded culture presents you with symbols that immediately
evoke your participation; they are all vital, living connections, and so they
link you both to the underlying mystery and to the culture itself. Yet when
that culture uses symbols that are no longer alive, that are no longer
effective, it cuts you off. The mãrga
or Elementargedanken provide a path
back to the heart of the issue. Looking at the symbol in terms of its universal
meaning rather than its local, specific reference takes you down the path to
self-discovery and illumination.

The way to
find your own myth is to determine those traditional symbols that speak to you
and use them, you might say, as base for meditation. Let them work on you.

A ritual is
nothing but the dramatic, visual, active manifestation or representation of
myth. By participating in the rite, you are engaged in the myth, and the myth
works on you – provided, of course, that you are caught by the image.

But when you
just go through the routine without real commitment, expecting it to work
magically and get you into heaven, after all – you’ve turned away from the
proper use of thee rites and images.

First, think
about your own childhood, as Jung did – the
symbols that were put in you then remain. Think not how they relate to an
institution, which is probably defunct and likely difficult to respect. Rather,
think how the symbols operate on you. Let them play on the imagination,
activating it. By bringing your own imagination into play in relation to these
symbols, you will be experiencing mãrga,
the symbol’s power to open a path to the heart of mysteries(…)”

Saturday, July 2, 2016

This painting, titled
Prince Marko and the Dragon (Kraljević Marko i zmaj), has been created for a
private collector. It is also one of the paintings from my new book project. It
shows Prince Marko, a great Serbian epic hero, performing one of his heroic
deeds. The character of Prince Marko is based on a 14th century Serbian
king of a minor historic importance, whom the people, while under the Turkish occupation
that lasted for more than 4 centuries, turned into the greatest epic hero who
bravely fought againstthe oppressor and
the injustice, and kept the people’s spirit alive during that long and complicated
period.

Although based on the
real person, the character of Prince Marko is basically constructed from two
major elements – an old, forgotten mythic hero, and the character of an
existing medieval ruler upon whom the people projected their needs, pains and
aspirations. Prince Marko is unbelievably strong - this strength comes from his
mythic base - brave and righteous. He’s a true chevalier; the protector of the
weak and the oppressed. However, his human side makes his character more
balanced and rather easy to identify with. Like any human being, Prince Marko has a
shadow. Next to the noble side of his personality, there is a darker side too -
at times, Marko can be very jealous, vain and even cruel. This contradictory
element in his character brings him closer to a real person and makes him more
accessible. On one side he is a perfect embodiment of the people’s struggles
and needs from a specific time; on the other, he genuinely reflects people’s
character with all their good and bad sides, their virtues and their vices, as
well as the moral principles people lived by. While still a quintessential epic
hero, Prince Marko is also a human being, one of us. This particular trait in
his character makes him very intriguing.

I was always impressed
by the old epic poetry about Prince Marko. But as I set out on my journey to
become an artist, I focused my attention primarily to the foreign art and
culture, especially the western culture. Then, in 1993(I was 28 years old), when I decided to
illustrate the most popular Serbian fairytale, Baš Čelik, eventually turning it
into The Legend of Steel Bashaw, I was finally back to my national and cultural
roots trying to express my relationship to that part of my identity though my
art. It took another 22 years to finally turn my attention to the epics, and to
create my first Prince Marko painting.

But as soon as I
started to work on this project, I faced a problem that presented me with a
serious challenge. Although I loved the character of Prince Marko, I was now not
very inspired to illustrate the old epic poems, apart from a few that I greatly
admired. The old epics are…well, old, and in spite of a number of aspects that are
universal in character, most of them deal with the specific problems that
reflect the existential struggles of the people from centuries ago. The Ottoman
Turks, the oppressor and the archenemy, have long gone and disappeared from the
stage. To continue to fight them and the specific problems that went with it,
seemed to me nothing but fighting against a spectre, a shadow of the past. It
felt so awkward, pointless and irrelevant to me, like a symbol that has lost
its meaning and purpose, but kept its empty shell – a dead symbol - that is how
mythologies and religions die, and in my opinion the myth of Prince Marko was dying
too. So, in spite of my relative lack of competence regarding the study of the
old epics, and guided only by my own vision, I finally decided to try to update
Prince Marko and his world, and bring them back to life. Now, if you are
familiar with the universe of Prince Marko epics, you will understand how
tricky and difficult this task is.

Nevertheless,
stubborn and persistent as I am, I set out on this new adventure to change Prince
Marko’s world, both in outer appearance and in content. The only way for me to
do it properly was to write new epic poems about Prince Marko. I began my work
by stripping off the epicworld of Prince
Marko of all the archaic, irrelevant elements, at the same time emphasizing its
mythic foundation. Likewise, I took in consideration the fact that the time spirit
has changed, and that people’s view, needs and aspirations have changed too, although
the universal values have stayed unaltered. I moved the balance, as it were, from
the irrelevance of the archaic to the universality of the mythological, and the
relevance of the contemporary. But, I kept the specific form of the old epics,
and most importantly I kept their original spirit, so that the new epics would
sound as if they were created by the folk bards of long ago.

This is my way to try
to reconnect the dying epic past with the living present, and to give my own quest
for the personal myth a firm, healthy starting point.

However, the final encouragement
to set out on a journey to discover my own myth by researching the myth I was
brought up with came from a dream. In other words, my future doings and the
direction that my artistic aspirations were about to take, was announced to me in
a dream. It was one of those vivid, striking dreams that one remembers for the
rest of his life, a type of dream that announces an important change (change of
direction) in one’s life. I wrote down this dream and I named it “The Golden
Book”. The biggest problem and challenge with dreams, however, is their
interpretation. It is quite complicated to know if the dream has been correctly
interpreted until that particular “story” ends. Therefore, and although my gut feeling
tells me that I am on the right path, I am not yet completely certain if I
interpreted my dream in the right way. Nevertheless, I intend to follow my
intuition and will do whatever is required to accomplish this important
project.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Back in the eighties, when I was studying art at the
Novi Sad Art Academy in Serbia, we had a teacher of Art History, an elderly
lady whotold
us that, once in her youth, she had met Picasso, and even had got from him one of
his famous painted vases as a present. She mentioned this little anecdote
often, and not without a certain amount of pride and self-contentment. This
little lady used to say:“No one is born
without a mother and a father”. The message of her saying was obvious -every person, creator and artist, has his own
roots, his creative parents, his springboard. We all had teachers, mentors and
role models at the beginning of our art career who helped us and showed us the
way, motivated and inspired us. Nothing comes out of nothing! As human animals,
we begin the process of learning by mimicking others from our surroundings.

People often asked me how, or where, did I learn to
paint. Well, as mentioned above, I did study painting at the art academy, but
although the time I spent there was not wasted – on the contrary, it was extremely
important for my artistic development - I
can’t say that I have learned how to paint there. The prevailing approach to art
and painting at that time was still very much based on and driven by the
modernistic dogma that favored free expression above the technical skills.
Therefore we were not encouraged to spend time and energy on learning the
technical aspect of painting, but rather to open ourselves to free expression. Focusing
on learning and developing the technical skills was not exactly prohibited, but
many did look upon it with a contemptuous eye.

I learned to paint mostly by studying the works of my
favorite artists, my role models, and by trying to learn from what I was able
to see and understand. Some of my most important role models included Rembrandt,
Johannes Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch, Ilya,
Repin, Paja Jovanvic, Uros Predic, John Singer Sargent, Viktor Vasnetsov, Ivan
Bilibin, Aksely Gallen-Kallela, Walt Disney, Arthum Rackham, Norman Rockwell,
Frank Frazetta, Alan Lee, among many others.

Conan by Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta

When I was about 12 years old, I began spending more
time on drawing. I copied works of various artists, mainly comic artists ( I
was at that time very much into comic art, and wanted to become a comic
artist). My mother used to drive me crazy by criticizing my urge to copy other
artist’s work. She would say: “You copy too much! Why don’t you try to do
something out your own imagination”? Her remarks were disturbing to me and have
often hurt my feelings (hence I never forgot about it). It was frustrating. On
one hand, I knew she was right. On the other, I felt I had to copy in order to
learn. I was so unsatisfied with what I could do from my own imagination. I did
not like very much the results - my own drawings seemed to be so imperfect,
lacking in all sorts of things and qualities. Thecopies of other people’s work which I did
looked much better, more convincing and mature. Little did my mother knewthat I would later become quite myself and
unique in my artistic expression. Somehow I managed to escape a dangerous trap
of becoming somebody else’s epigone. I don’t know when, or how it happened, but
it did happen – gradually I found myself. Moreover, I even became a kind of
“preacher” of the importance of going after your own uniqueness, and becoming
utterly yourself in your artistic expression.

However, I never forgot my role models. From time to
time, I revisit their art in search of inspiration, motivation and consolation.
Sometimes, I do cite them in my own work, or, now and then, even paint a homage
to some of them. But I never copy their work anymore. I just allow myself to be
inspired by their creations, but then let this impulse go through my own artistic
inner prism, and try to create something uniquely mine…. as much as I am able
to.

All Rights Reserved on all images appearing within these webpages. All images copyright Petar Meseldzija, except where noted. No part of these images may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including but not limited to photo copying and scanning, whether now known or hereafter created, without written permission from the artist.